This is what the novel "The Great Gatsby" is about: The American dream of constant self-creation, self-made status, identity you slip on as easily as a pale pink suit. The strange dreamland of the past, which paradoxically both fades and strengthens with time. The small child's belief that we can have anything we want, if we just want it badly enough.

This is what the novel "The Great Gatsby" is not about: Eye-popping explosions of 3D which, coupled with extreme closeups, push people's faces at us like the attractions at a carnival. A madman's mix of music that throws together Gershwin jazz, Jay-Z hip-hop, and a Bach fugue. Black extras used like exotic props, there only to serve and sweat, or leer and shimmy.

And that is what the movie "The Great Gatsby" is in love with.

There are good things in it. There's Leonardo DiCaprio as the title character, the poor little farmboy who put on an officer's uniform, briefly won and lost the heart of a girl, and then made an outrageous (and illegal) fortune in the hopes of winning her back.

Gatsby is himself a kind of movie star; the role requires one to work, and the golden DiCaprio is that, arriving on screen to literal fireworks and a surge of romantic music.

But Gatsby is slightly absurd, too - his completely unembarrassed and breathlessly shallow consumerism, his awkwardly stilted speech, his way of calling everyone "old sport." It sounds fake, but that's because it is, and DiCaprio instinctively understands the mirror act, as well - he's an actor playing an actor playing a role.

Carey Mulligan is even better as Daisy Buchanan, one of the most difficult characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction. She insists, early on, that to be happy in this life a woman should be "a beautiful little fool" - but that's only because this sadly wilted Daisy knows what being smart has brought her. For she was never quite as impractical as the dashing, penniless soldier who asked her to wait.

And this is the broken heart of "The Great Gatsby," because it was the wound Fitzgerald carried and always would - the knowledge, from those first days at Princeton, that money made its own luck, and that without it, he would never be more than the smartest, nicest poor boy that the beautiful rich girls ever smiled at, for a moment, before moving away.

Those two performances are - have to be - the center of the movie and DiCaprio and Mulligan don't disappoint. But Joel Edgerton is too loud and blustery at first as Tom Buchanan (it's no fault of his; director Baz Luhrmann loves huge, overbearing, theatrical entrances) and Tobey Maguire remains pale and goggle-eyed as our narrator, Nick. Worse, the movie crams it all into an unnecessary frame, with him telling us Gatsby's story from behind the walls of a sanitarium. It's like "The Cabinet of Mr. Nick Carraway."

But these are, of course, only the supposed stars. The real star of any Baz Luhrmann film must be Baz Luhrmann. And he wears out his welcome very early.

The 3D, for example, adds a little to some scenes - particularly the simultaneous nearness, and distance, of Daisy's house across the bay. But then Luhrmann makes the effect superfluous by going for lots of closeups, and a very shallow depth of field. Background characters are either lost in the mists, or brought suddenly, startlingly to the foreground.

And the much-vaunted hip-hop soundtrack - well, to begin with, it isn't nearly as novel as Luhrmann has convinced himself. (There was a 2005 movie, "G" -- which everyone seems to have forgotten - which even made Gatsby a rap mogul.) But neither do the tunes add anything. The soundtrack of the era - "Oh the rich get rich and the poor get poorer" - was perfect as it was.

In the end, the modern music's just another unnecessary flourish - like the slow-motion of a car crash (shown twice), the faded wartime flashbacks or the falling shards of glass that glitter like snowflakes. At one point, as Nick starts writing about Gatsby - and the movie's crudest conceit is that Nick is a would-be novelist, and a direct stand-in for Fitzgerald himself - words even appear on the screen. Then they fade.

But some words won't. And "The Great Gatsby" - the real Gatsby - never will as, like boats against the current, new readers are borne ceaselessly back into its prose.

Snapshot: Baz Luhrmann directs an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic Jazz Age novel, about a World War I veteran who finds himself amid the whirlwind of conspicuous consumption of New York's social uppercrust.

What works: A key of the film are the performances of Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, and they don't disappoint.

What doesn't: It's filled with unnecessary flourishes, from the hip-hop soundtrack to the 3D to the overall overindulgent vibe.